The present invention relates to high volume buses for transferring data.
In many computer systems, it is often necessary to transfer large blocks of data between the computer and a storage unit. The buses used for this type of data transfer must usually compromise between the number of lines required for the bus and-the speed at which a transfer can be accomplished. Typically, the more lines that are used, the greater the speed that can be achieved. In addition, a bus may be optimized for the average size of a block of data to be sent and the average number of users to be desiring access to the bus. Some sort of arbitration mechanism is necessary to decide which user gets to use the bus at any particular time.